ABSTRACT
Vertues Common-wealth by Henry Crosse contains strong echoes of the Groats-worth letter that accuses William Shakespere of hiring scholars to write for him and taking all the credit. In 1603, John Newbery published Vertues Common-wealth: or The Highway to Honour by Henry Crosse. With textual parallels supported by Early English Books Online searches to establish rarity, the case is strong that Vertues Common-wealth acted at least as a source for Francis Bacon. Michael Waltzer frames the publication as a dissertation on the dangers of wealth, the typical product of a moralist responding unhappily to the sudden affluence of his society. The most striking resemblances between the Crosse pamphlet and Bacon’s corpus take the form of apophthegms, that is, short witty aphorisms. In 1623, Bacon published De Augmentis Scientiarum, in which his view on the relationship between plays and moral philosophy seems to echo Crosse’s.
